Tag: Re-Rat

In Finest Hour 142, Spring 2009, I proud­ly pre­sent­ed the Churchill Re-Rat Award (issued infre­quent­ly) to Sen­a­tor Judd Gregg (R.-NH), who accept­ed nom­i­na­tion as Pres­i­dent Obama’s Sec­re­tary of Com­merce but then with­drew, say­ing he could not bal­ance “being in the Cab­i­net ver­sus myself as an indi­vid­ual doing my job.” Gregg’s nom­i­na­tion had sewn fear among con­ser­v­a­tives who learned that NH’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Gov­er­nor, John Lynch, would appoint a lib­er­al Repub­li­can in his place.

On 26 Jan­u­ary 1941 Win­ston Churchill, who had desert­ed the Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty for the Lib­er­als in 1904 but oozed back into the Con­ser­v­a­tive Par­ty in 1925 (after being appoint­ed Chan­cel­lor of the Exche­quer the pre­vi­ous year by Con­ser­v­a­tive Prime Min­is­ter Stan­ley Bald­win) remarked to his pri­vate sec­re­tary John Colville: “Any­one can rat, but it takes a cer­tain amount of inge­nu­ity to re-rat.” He was pre­scient.…